They hung in the thermosphere like a school of slow fish—fragments of people, each one a thin negative of a life. A firefighter still wearing his helmet. A bride whose veil trailed into nothing. A man in a business suit, tie flapping in solar wind. None of them spoke. But I heard them anyway.
I fell through every layer, screaming without a throat, and slammed back into myself so hard I bit my tongue. Blood on the pillow. My mother never stopped knitting. The fever broke an hour later. They hung in the thermosphere like a school
He never came back down.
The first time it happened, I was seven years old, flat on my back with a fever of 104. The ceiling’s water stain—a leering map of South America—began to wobble. Then it dropped. A man in a business suit, tie flapping in solar wind
At fifty miles up, I met the others.